Roney-O’Brien’s ‘Bone Circle’ an intensely personal journey

Joshua Lyford

Thursday

Jan 24, 2019 at 12:01 AM

It’s a crisp January afternoon as poet Susan Roney-O’Brien settles into a comfortable chair in her Princeton living room. She is surrounded by old maps. A compass painted on the floor points north. Her chocolate lab traipses, tongue lolling, tail wagging, into the space. He climbs precariously onto her lap.

“He likes being the center of attention,” the poet said, smiling. “He thinks he’s a lap dog and — as far as his mouth goes — he is a lapdog.”

Unlike her dog Oliver, whose tail beats like a metronome on a table in the center of the room, Roney-O’Brien doesn’t enjoy being the center of attention. In her latest poetry collection, “Bone Circle,” published through Kelsay Books, the poet exposes her truth in ways she never had before. “Bone Circle” is intensely personal and in sharing these poems, Roney-O’Brien reveals parts of her life she had not previously shared in print. Until a friend in a writing group told her others with similar experiences would be deprived of “being able to have words for the things she went through,” they may have stayed in her private collection forever.

“I had to unload,” she said, leaning back in her chair. “I had been alienated from my family for 26 years, after my mother died. It was hard to decide whether to send it anywhere or not, because it’s so personal. That’s why the first poem is there. It gives me an out in case my family finds it and reads it. I can say, ‘Oh no, that’s a friend of mine, they just told me their story.’ The first one is a cover-my-ass poem.”

The poem she is referring to is called “Disclaimer,” a fascinating look inside the architect of the collection and of the collection itself. When you read, “I was wondering how to tell you. Your life is my life. In fact, everybody’s life is my life. 0 Just so you know,” you understand hers is a different sort of selection.

Like a perfect rural Massachusetts stonewall-framework, the poet parallels her work. Both are honest — sometimes bluntly so, sometimes gingerly — and both are reflective. O’Brien speaks softly, but with a quiet authority. She never charges into an interview response, preferring a more thoughtful approach, but she doesn’t lean on a false confidence. Roney-O’Brien, the woman and the poet, are exactly who they are and that’s that. So when asked who she wrote “Bone Circle” for, she responded the only way she could: with great consideration.

“I want to say it’s for the people who don’t have voices, but I didn’t think that when I was writing it,” she said. “That’s kind of me showing you that I’m really a good person. That’s probably not true. Everything you write is about you, whether you think it is or not, because it shows some part of you. Whether you’re good at looking closely at things, or stepping back and examining a relationship, it’s all about you. I didn’t realize that about poetry until about three months ago. I don’t like being the center of attention, I don’t like being in the spotlight. I’m much more reticent.”

Seated in her warm farmhouse next to her 100-pound chocolate lab, Roney-O’Brien may be reticent, but she is certainly not afraid to dive deeply into her answer.

“I dont think it’s for my kids,” she said. “I sent them the manuscript before it got out because I didn’t want them to be shocked. My daughter’s response was, ‘Oh mom, did all of these things really happen to you?’ That’s part of why disclaimer is there, to protect my kids view of my life growing up. Not changing the past, but sugar coating it a little bit.”

As Oliver circles the coffee table, eventually settling on a position on the living room couch, Roney-O’Brien pauses, before tilting her head and gazing to the corner of her room. All of her answers were the truth, but some truths are more potent than others.

“There are people out there who don’t know how to start talking about things like sexual abuse, parental avoidance of issues, stuff like that. It would be nice if they could see that it’s OK,” she said.

There are no other questions left on the stained reporter notepad, but there aren’t many needed when chatting with Roney-O’Brien. She is as honest and open as she is warm and funny. Her sense of humor is always waiting just beneath the surface to punctuate the conversation, but every so often the room stops and the air seems to go still. Her home knows when she is about to speak her truth and anyone listening does too.

“I don’t know how much is real memory, how much is stuff that my mind has put together, stuff that people have told me,” she said of her poems. “That’s why there’s never any final resolution if there was sexual abuse or not, I really don’t know. I hope that comes through. There wasn’t any definite answer to whether that happened or not. I feel that’s true for a lot of women. You remember it a certain way. My mother always tried to talk me out of it, so I don’t know if I remember it the way it happened or whether I made it up or filled in the blanks. Your brain does that. That’s another thing that happens in the book. You are not given an answer, you’re given the possibilities. I think that’s good, it doesn’t blame anyone. I didn’t want to blame anyone because that wasn’t something I needed.”

The poet sits up and walks across the room to a shelf near a glass door revealing the forest behind her home. She picks up a fan covered in Chinese calligraphy. For the time, the subject changes. The poet, who would demur from the limelight when possible, just returned from a trip to China alongside seven other writers.

“They’re under the impression that I’m really famous,” she said with a laugh. Roney-O’Brien has been published in the country for 20 years. “It was like being a rockstar. We were in five-star hotels, we were carted around. Everywhere we went, there were newspaper people and television cameras. It was insane.”

While she enjoyed the trip, Roney-O’Brien was acutely aware of the struggle the Chinese population — women in particular — face.

“They showed us what they wanted us to see, that was very clear,” she said. “Women and men are treated very differently in China. It’s getting better, but because I knew that, I had to give a course. I gave it on American women poets. Afterward, one woman came up to me, a Chinese woman who had been teaching in Denmark for 10 years. She had recently come back and she had a PhD and she thanked me for mentioning the women. She said, ‘We don’t know much about women poets in China.’”

In order to be published in China, you must be a part of a state-sponsored workshop. Approval of those workshops goes through a board and, whether for anti-subversionary reasons, or reasons of maintaining long-standing gender roles, the male-dominated publishers operating the workshops allow for few women.

“There are a few,” Roney-O’Brien said, folding her fan back into itself. “But they’re very carefully watched.”

Back home in Princeton, where Roney-O’Brien writes each morning after returning from Oliver’s morning walk, she sits back down in her chair by the window and reflects on the poetry in “Bone Circle.” There is a smile on her face, but it is not for us, and she speaks to someone that may or may not be in the room.

“I got rid of alot,” she said calmly. “One of the things I’ve always said is that with poetry, you’ve taken an ugly experience out of your head and put it on a piece of paper. That paper looks like a frame. If you’re putting something in a frame it has to be perfect. It doesn’t have to be perfectly beautiful, it has to be perfect for what it is. The poems that come out, they may not be pleasant, but they are the best they can be. They tell the kind of truth that needs to be told.”

“Bone Circle” can be purchased online at Kelsaybooks.com or at Bedlam Book Cafe at 138 Green St.